page_title: U.S. prisoners of war during the Vietnam War
section_title: Post-war accounts
hierarchical_section_title: U.S. prisoners of war during the Vietnam War / Post-war accounts
caption_attribution_description: English: Prisoners lined up for release on 27 March 1973 at the airport. Marines pictured among the 27 returnees freed that day were Sgt Jose J. Anzaldua, fourth from the left, and Sgt Dennis A. Tellier, second from the right. The bus was camouflaged as a defense against air attack.
context_page_description: Members of the United States armed forces were held as prisoners of war in significant numbers during the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1973. Unlike U.S. service members captured in World War II and the Korean War, who were mostly enlisted troops, the overwhelming majority of Vietnam-era POWs were officers, most of them Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps airmen; a relatively small number of Army enlisted personnel were also captured, as well as one enlisted Navy seaman who fell overboard from a naval vessel. Most U.S. prisoners were captured and held in North Vietnam by the People's Army of Vietnam; a much smaller number were captured in the south and held by the Việt Cộng. A handful of U.S. civilians were also held captive during the war.
  Thirteen prisons and prison camps were used to house U.S. prisoners in North Vietnam, the most widely known of which was Hỏa Lò Prison. The treatment and ultimate fate of U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam became a subject of widespread concern in the United States, and hundreds of thousands of Americans wore POW bracelets with the name and capture date of imprisoned U.S. service members.
context_section_description: After the implementation of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, neither the United States nor its allies ever formally charged North Vietnam with the war crimes revealed to have been committed there. Extradition of North Vietnamese officials who had violated the Geneva Convention, which they had always insisted officially did not bind them because their nation had never signed it, was not a condition of the U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam and ultimate abandonment of the South Vietnamese government. In the 2000s, the Vietnamese government has held the position that claims that prisoners were tortured during the war are fabricated, but that Vietnam wants to move past the issue as part of establishing better relations with the U.S.  Bùi Tín, a North Vietnamese Army colonel-later turned dissident and exile, who believed that the cause behind the war had been just but that the country's political system had lost its way after reunification, maintained in 2000 that no torture had occurred in the POW camps. Tin stated that there were "a few physical hits like a slap across the face, or threats, in order to obtain the specific confessions," and that the worst that especially resistant prisoners such as Stockdale and Jeremiah Denton encountered was being confined to small cells. Tran Trong Duyet,  a jailer at Hoa Lo beginning in 1968 and its commandant for the last three years of the war, maintained in 2008 that no prisoners were tortured. However, eyewitness accounts by American servicemen present a different account of their captivity.
  After the war, Risner wrote the book Passing of the Night detailing his seven years at the Hanoi Hilton.  Indeed, a considerable literature emerged from released POWs after repatriation, depicting Hoa Lo and the other prisons as places where such atrocities as murder; beatings; broken bones, teeth and eardrums; dislocated limbs; starvation; serving of food contaminated with human and animal feces; and medical neglect of infections and tropical disease occurred. These details are revealed in accounts by McCain (Faith of My Fathers), Denton, Alvarez, Day, Risner, Stockdale and dozens of others. The Hanoi Hilton was depicted in the 1987 Hollywood movie The Hanoi Hilton.
  In addition to memoirs, the U.S. POW experience in Vietnam was the subject of two in-depth accounts by authors and historians, John G. Hubbell's P.O.W.: A Definitive History of the American Prisoner-of-War Experience in Vietnam, 1964–1973 (published 1976) and Stuart Rochester and Frederick Kiley's Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, 1961–1973 (published 1999).
caption: American POWs in North Vietnam lining up for release on March 27, 1973
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